It's fun but as I tested it I realized how this is pretty much the modern equivalent of a Facebook quiz that asks you the name of your first pet, first car and mother's maiden name.
If they recorded any of that they likely have enough to clone my voice somewhat faithfully.
Congratulations on labelling my French Canadian accent as French though, I'll have to work on my pronounciation more to fool the AI.
I have a similar experience, but my impression is that Parisians have little patience for accents in general. People elsewhere in France where I've visited (Aix-en-provence, Lyon, Toulouse) had no trouble chatting with me.
Also want to note that I am not passing judgement, I am sure I might become a bit brusque with tourists if Montreal had the same volume.
My wife was a French major in college and spent a year in Aix in the mid 80s. She didn't really enjoy the experience -- although her grammar and vocab were fine, she had enough of an accent that people treated her as an outsider.
On the way out of the country she stopped in Paris for a few days to take it in. She went into some shop and the proprietor asked my wife if she needed help. My wife replied asked about some clothes. The proprietor insulted my wife over her southern accent -- French southern, not US southern, and it made my wife's day. Someone in France finally thought she was french.
Does it regionalize at all? There are a few comments about Portugal Portuguese vs Brazil Portuguese so I think it only tries to find your first language, not actually pinpoint the underlying accent.
Ya it doesn't seem to go down into dialect, its the broad scope, it nailed my wifes spanish accent even though i really can't hear it at all and she talks very american
It would be nice if they were clear they wouldn't keep the sample on the page. They do have a privacy policy on their main site www.boldvoice.com/privacy
It didn't guess for me other than to say I was a native speaker.
Hi, founder here! We're a YC-funded education app with over 1 million downloads, currently #7 on the Education chart of the App Store. The goal of the accent oracle tool is to help more non-native English speakers find out about BoldVoice. While it's important as consumers to be aware of data privacy with AI tools in general, I want to set the record straight that that's not the point of what we're doing here.
But great to hear that we got your accent right :)
Hey! Just to be clear I really didn't want to imply that you were trying to clone my voice. I think your product is very interesting and this demo is a nice showcase of your tech.
It was meant more as a reflection on how, due to how fast threat models evolve, even the seemingly innocuous act of recording 2 sentences on a random website can now be used to break into my bank account.
I tried the app, and it's great. As a near-native French speaker I would be interested in working out my French pronunciation, hopefully you will go multi-language soon.
Did you know that something like 80% of the websites you visit are tracked by a handful of companies which are all effectively sharing that with many thousands of ad and data broker companies which can easily narrow you down? It's not tinfoil hat land to knkw that nearly every site you visit has cross-site tracking.
If they recorded any of that they likely have enough to clone my voice somewhat faithfully.
Congratulations on labelling my French Canadian accent as French though, I'll have to work on my pronounciation more to fool the AI.